Cozy Yoga Life Ep 11: Menopause

In this episode of Cozy Yoga Life, I share real-life struggles yoga teachers face while navigating the complexities of menopause. 🌸 From sleepless nights to overwhelming emotions, menopause brings unique challenges that can feel isolating and frustrating, especially when you're responsible for holding space for others.

Join me as I share my personal experience, practical tips, and uplifting insights on how to maintain balance, embrace change, and find support during this transformational phase. Whether you're experiencing menopause yourself or supporting others through it, this episode is filled with honest conversations and empowering tools to help you thrive through the chaos.

Links related to this episode:

• The New Menopause by Dr. Mary Claire Haver
• Yoga Class Planners

Connect with me:

• Subscribe to my YouTube channel
• Send me a DM on Instagram
• Visit Cozy Yoga Life

Transcript

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You're listening to Cozy Yoga Life the podcast for yoga teachers who crave more from their practice and lives. I'm Shannon Caldwell, and I'll be your guide on this journey of simplicity, self care and self discovery. So let's cozy up, unwind, and dive into today's episode. Hello, Cozy Crew. Welcome to another episode in season two, where we are focusing on the theme of real life struggles for yoga teachers. Hopefully you've had a chance to listen to our first episode, where I offered an introduction into what I'm going to be talking about this season. So let's get started in this episode's focus, which is going to be about menopause. And I selected menopause because this is a struggle that is near and dear to my heart. I encourage you to give it a listen, even if you're not going through menopause yourself, because I promise you at some point, menopause is going to impact you, whether you experience it for yourself, whether you know someone who's going through it, or you instruct students who are going through menopause. Since this is all about open and honest conversation, I have to let you know that before I went through menopause, I was terribly uninformed and uneducated about it. And to the point that I was judgmental and dismissive of other people who were going through It.. But it's funny how our perspective changes once we are directly impacted by an issue. One of the biggest arguments that float around about menopause is it's a natural part of life and I absolutely agree with that. But so is getting your period and we seem to be so much more compassionate toward people who are menstruating than we do towards people who don't have their periods. We accept that individuals have widely varying periods. Some have lighter, some have heavier. Some last a couple of days while others last for a full week. We know people or even experienced ourselves, painful cramps, headaches, and then we also know individuals who breeze right through their period, without it ever interfering in their day-to-day lives. When it comes to menopause, however, we only seem to have one brush to paint with. So my hope is that in this discussion we can grab all the paint brushes and all the colors, and really start to bring a bigger, wider, broader picture to menopause. Let's have those meaningful discussions. Let's open air it so others know they're not alone. Let's make it so that the next generation is better informed and better educated than the previous generation. A lot of the information that I'm going to share with you is, one, from my own experience, and two from a doctor that I've been following for about six months to a year. And that doctor is Mary Claire Haver, and this book, The New Menopause. I really appreciate the time, the attention and research that Dr. Haver put into her book and the time that she puts in to educate women about menopause and educate everybody about menopause: doctors, physical therapists, personal trainers. She along with a handful of other doctors are really trying to change the discussion around menopause. And I hope with this episode that I can contribute to the positive conversations that are happening around this midlife transition. Let's start with a quick definition.of perimenopause, menopause and post menopause, and kind of give you a timeframe for each of those stages. The clinical definition of menopause is going 12 consecutive months without a period. Once you hit that point, you have hit menopause. The average age for meno pause is 51. However, normally it can occur somewhere between 45 and 55. Although the entire process is called menopause, Dr. Haver, she says menopause is a single day, a single moment in your life. That moment when you've gone 12 months without a period. And so there may be days, weeks, months, even years that lead up to that time. And then every day after, until we die, is considered post-menopause. During perimenopause, your hormones, specifically, estrogen and progesterone, they are fluctuating all over the place and that is what's causing the majority of the symptoms that we encounter. And one thing that Dr. Haver points out is that perimenopause can start up to 10 years before. If the earliest normal time to start menopause is around 45 and we back that up seven to 10 years. Then you have individuals around 35 who could be experiencing symptoms associated with perimenopause and menopause. And listen, the list of symptoms associated with menopause is no joke and it is way more than what most people think of in terms of hot flashes and mood swings. Yes, those are two common symptoms, but they are only two out of a list of 50-60 symptoms. Let me run down a quick list of just a few of the symptoms and I wrote them down. You're going to see me reading them because there was no way I could remember all of these symptoms that are associated with menopause. So we've got, besides the hot flashes. Digestion issues, crawling skin sensation, depression, dizzy spells dry eyes, dry mouth fatigue. Heart palpitations, insulin resistance, body composition changes, memory issues, mental health disorders. Muscle aches, thinning hair and skin, insomnia, waking up at 4:00 AM. And some of the symptoms that I dealt with are headaches, joint achiness. The bottom of my feet were sore when I would walk on them. I had itchy ears, the brain fog. Oh my gosh. The brain fog is real. I call it the Swiss cheese brain, Difficulty concentrating bloating, dry skin. My anxiety was heightened. I started experiencing high cholesterol, night sweats, uncomfortable intercourse. More frequent urinary tract infections. I was having problems sleeping, waking up at 3:00 AM. 4:00 AM. And what a lot of us can associate with menopause is that sudden weight gain, especially in the belly area, in that middle area. There are a lot more than I haven't even mentioned. For a long time, it felt like it was all in my head. I really thought there was something mentally wrong with me. I did not feel like myself. Everything felt off. Everything felt like a major effort to complete. I was tired all the time. I could sleep eight, nine hours the night before and still by 3:00 PM be dragging and just want to lay down and take a nap. If you've heard that phrase, hot mess, express, this totally applied to me. And at the time I did not connect it with perimenopause or menopause. I contributed it to elevated stress from coming out of the pandemic. From one of my stepdaughters graduating high school, getting ready to go to college. I thought it was just the stress from all of those midlife transitions that can happen also around the same time that a woman goes through menopause. The people that I have talked to about menopause and the symptoms. I'm not the only one. There's a lot of us feeling this added pressure, this added stress. We don't feel like ourselves. We've been healthy throughout our lives. We practice yoga regularly. We practice meditation and then suddenly, almost like it was overnight. We feel completely different. We don't even feel like we know ourselves anymore. We don't feel like we know our minds or our bodies anymore. And especially if you're into holistic practices like yoga that can feel really scary. If you've listened to previous episodes, you may remember when I talk about being on my bathroom floor, going through a major panic attack, crying and sobbing, and just not understanding what was going on. At the time, I attributed that again to the anxiety and I started to see a therapist. Now that I'm post-menopause and looking back, I can see really where menopause was probably the biggest contributing factor to my puddling on the floor. Unfortunately, our medical industry is also terribly uninformed and uneducated about menopause. If you look at the statistics, if you look at women and our average age of hitting menopause is 51 and then our life expectancy is somewhere between 76 years old and 81 years old we're living a third of our life within menopause. So shouldn't there be better information. Shouldn't our doctors be better informed about helping women through this natural transition. Helping to support them. Not gaslighting them and telling women that it's all in our heads. If you have listened to the first episode where I was introducing this theme, I gave a definition of toxic positivity and how that runs rampant in yoga circles. And I gave an example. I want to provide that same example, a little bit expanded to do with menopause. In certain circles in holistic practices, there is this pervasive belief that all the healing that you do can be done through better eating, movement and exercise meditation, stress reduction, et cetera. And that any time you seek help outside of that triage of practices, you can be shamed and judged for it. Eating well and exercising, practicing yoga, and doing meditation, while that improves a lot of facets of your life and will make a living life a little bit easier. It doesn't automatically fix everything. And to say that it does and to dismiss what people are experiencing, whether mentally or emotional is a form of toxic positivity. I did most of peri-menopause"naturally." And some of my symptoms did lessen, but I was still very uncomfortable mentally and physically, emotionally. I had a cabinet overflowing of all of these supplements that were suggested to me, get this, try this supplement. This will really help. Add this to your morning coffee, drink your green tea at night and put your three drops of this in there. I am really embarrassed to tell you that I don't know how much money I spent on that cabinet full of supplements. Probably in the hundreds. Per month. Then I read The New Menopause and got a better and fuller understanding of what was happening in my body, what was creating all of this chaos inside of me. And to learn that it's my body running out of estrogen and progesterone, and that estrogen is linked to every organ within our body, that the loss of it, the stoppage of estrogen has far reaching effects. And I won't go into those because I don't want this to get statistic-y but again, grab that book, go to your library, check it out, buy it online. After reading through it, I contemplated hormone replacement therapy. But I let my yoga biases cloud my judgment. Because it wasn't natural. It wasn't organic. I'm putting chemicals into my body, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff that we've talked about. Then I remembered 20 years ago when I went through a major depressive episode that my brain required medication to right the chemistry in my brain again. That got me thinking. If that medication righted the chemistry in my brain. What if I went on HRT hormone replacement therapy and that righted the chemistry in my body? So after a lot of debate, deciding if that was the right path for me or not, I went to my doctor. My doctor was completely open to the discussion of hormone replacement therapy. I wasn't dismissed. I truly felt listened to. And that is not the experience of every woman who goes to her gynecologist or her medical provider. A lot of menopausal people have to go through several doctors until they find one who will listen to them. I did not have that experience and I am truly, truly grateful. After going through the pros and cons with my medical provider, she gave me a prescription for the hormone replacement therapy and I started it. I'm four months into it and I pretty much symptom free. I don't have the hot flashes. I don't have the night sweats. I am sleeping through the night. I don't have to get up at 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM to go to the bathroom and then try to get back to sleep. I am thinking more clearly again. I don't have as much brain fog. I still have those Swiss cheese brain moments. I am feeling more like myself. I am feeling energetic again, I don't hit a 3:00 PM slump. Honestly, it feels really good to feel like myself again, to feel like I'm getting to know my mind and body again, that we're not working against each other. And this was probably a good place to add that I am also being mindful about what I eat. I have picked up strength training. I'm exercising regularly. I'm working toward reducing my stress. I am prioritizing my sleep. If any of you went through teacher training with me, you may remember that I am a night owl. Now I try very hard to go to bed by 11:30. I'm trying to have good quality sleep because that goes a long way to helping everything. Referencing self-study from our niyamas. That is about learning from others who've been before us. It is about reading and learning from text and gathering all of this information, this knowledge. At the end of the day, applying those lessons that are going to be the best for you. So while for me, the right path was the combination. It might not be the right path for you. Why menopause as a real life struggle of yoga teachers. I've been training yoga teachers since my early thirties and many of the teachers were around my age. Maybe a little older, maybe a little younger. This is something that you might be going through yourself and if there was ever a support group needed, it's those of us going through that mid life transition. Just to have someone to talk with, someone who can support us To not feel alone and maybe possibly feel just a little less crazy. So what if you are a yoga teacher going through menopause? It can be particularly challenging. We have to be physically and mentally present for our students. Fatigue and brain fog can make that really challenging. I know before perimenopause that sometimes I'd be working through a sequence and I completely forget a whole side. Now, there might be whole sections that I leave out or be teaching and be completely lost. Where was I going with that thought? Also for me, I have joint pain and I have more muscle tightness. There are some postures that a month ago felt fine and now not so much. So as a yoga teacher, I've had to make concessions for my own body. One lesson I have always emphasized with my yoga teachers in training is to never be afraid or shy about showing your human-ness. When we are imperfect. When we show our real life to our students. We give them permission to be imperfect as well. They know that it's okay whatever they're going through whether they're having trouble focusing in yoga class whether they're falling over because their balances is out of whack that day. Hey, it's okay. You can be in your human form as well. Now what about if you're teaching people who are going through menopause? What can you do to better support them? While I've been focusing on real life struggles and some of the negativity that can be found in yoga circles and the yoga industry. Honestly, yoga is a great way of managing menopausal symptoms. It's going to help with those achy joints, it's gonna help with the muscle stiffness. It's going to help us lower our stress. As yoga teachers, how can we enhance those benefits of yoga? One of the ways that we can benefit anybody that we're teaching is again that open and honesty, being transparent and being inclusive. If you own a studio or if you offer classes, I encourage you to start offering non-hot classes. Classes that are cooler temperatures, that move a little bit more slowly, that will focus in on those particular symptoms of menopause, the achy joints, the stiffness, the relaxation, restoration the deep breathing. Focus both on stretching and strength building.Because we're, we're learning that strength building is really important. As we get older, we want to maintain our muscle mass. We don't want to lose it. So we can create those classes that are cooler, yet still focused on strength training without throwing in a thousand sun salutations. I always love theming my classes because I can weave little lessons in. So what a great opportunity to weave in lessons about transition, letting go, acceptance and empowerment. Give your students the tools they need to feel empowered on the yoga mat and off the yoga mat. I would love for you to join in on the conversation. Share with me your experience: your personal experience, if you're going through menopause, or have gone through it. Or maybe you are a teacher focusing in on this particular demographic. I want to hear from you. And I, again, I highly recommend Dr. Mary Claire Haver's book The New Menopause. I'll have that link for you down below. If you need help creating yoga classes for your menopausal students, check out my Yoga Class Planner series That wraps another soul nourishing episode of Cozy Yoga Life. As always, thank you for letting me be a part of your yoga journey. If you enjoyed today's authentic conversation, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Until next time, stay cozy, take care of yourself, and keep it real.